1. Field of the Invention
Various embodiments of the present invention deal with man machine interfaces capable of remotely sending commands to electronic devices. More specifically, various embodiments relate to motion capture devices, such as remote controls or air mice used for recognizing gestures used as a command code for electronic devices having a touch screen, such as tablets devices including the i-Pad™ from Apple™, the Galaxy™ from Samsung™, the Nexus™ from Google™ or the Surface™ from Microsoft™.
2. Description of the Related Art
Touch screen devices are, in their standard operating modes, controlled by a direct interaction of the user with the tactile surface of the screen. But such tablets can be used to watch movies, play games, or display presentations. In this case, the user sits or stands at a distance from the tablet and it would be advantageous to be able to still control the device without touching it. A remote control or an air mouse normally controls the motion of a single point (a cursor) on a screen it is pointing at, and the functions controlled by the cursor may be triggered by a button on the remote. Using a remote control is inherently different from direct interaction with a touch screen where the user is controlling the functions of a tablet by tapping, holding, scrolling, dragging or rotating one or a plurality of fingers directly on the screen. In this direct interaction, there is no cursor and no button and the control is more intuitive. Moreover, when more than one finger is used, there is no direct correspondence to a single cursor controlled by a remote control/air mouse.
U.S. Patent Publication No. 2007/0208528, incorporated herein by reference, discloses a system wherein a device is controlled by an input device producing sensor signals which are converted into a second set of signals comprising signals substantially similar to the touch-screen input signals from the touch screen device.
But the signal conversion process of this prior art system is complex and does not solve the problem of how to use a remote control to control the functions of a device with touch commands, especially when these touch commands consist of multi-touch actions where the interactions of more than one finger need to be interpreted by a target device.